Books: Pastoral Symphony

In 1944, British Navy flyer John Moore lay in a Normandy field and
watched ancient buildings in the town of Caen go up in flames. Near by,
a Norman farmer, cursing quietly and steadily, was extracting a bomb
splinter from a cow's hindquarters. But for the accident of the English
Channel, Moore reflected, this scene might have been laid in his own
birthplacethe once-Norman market town of Elmbury, near Stratford on
Avon.